Good and Ideal Parent

Good and Ideal Parent
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Good and Ideal Parent
Good and ideal parents may be mainly defined by their ability to offer good parenting to their children. Parenting may involve a specific level of discretion, where no standard rule is set for all children because they may need different ranges of expression of love, attention and toughness. Most parents are normally worried about the way they can help their toddlers in developing socially, mentally, as well as emotionally (McLeod, 2007). It is very crucial to understand children and their abilities. Good parents are always concerned about their children’s development in various areas. The review of work from several theorists on childhood development will be helpful in supporting the personal idea of what it means to be a good parent.
Good parenting would have a personal meaning of raising a child in a reasonable level of love, care as well as perfect guidance, as explained through various theories. One of the renowned theorists on childhood development, Piaget thought of cognitive development of a child as based on four types of operations. He mentions these as accommodation and assimilation, conservation as well as reversibility, putting in that the first two relate closely. It is agreeable that as toddlers begin to take note of fresh information regarding the environment; it gets assimilated into their thinking which is termed as schemata, while the behavior and thinking are accommodated or altered so that they can reflect new perceptions. Conservations involve the ability of children to recognize the diversity between reality and appearance. Piaget also states that toddlers normally develop mentally, psychologically and emotionally according to the way their physical bodies allow them. It is compared by the inability of a young baby to walk until it has developed well physically, the same way does the brain fail to reason until it has physically developed to the specific stage of reasoning. In addition, he stated that the children pass through four stages which are related by age and qualitatively different. The first stage is known as sensorimotor that is from the point of birth to two years. The infants at this level are capable of constructing and beginning to understand the environment around them. The preoperational stage bears the ages of two to seven years, which allows children to begin representing the world with actions and words. The concrete operational stage placed on the third level, takes place between the seven and eleven years. Here, the child is capable of making logical reasoning concerning concrete events. Therefore, this stage allows children to think about actual events. The formal operational stage is the fourth and ranges from eleven years through the adulthood, where the child is capable of reasoning in abstract manners. For instance, they have the ability to think about the way it would be to hover in space.
On the other hand, Vygotsky argues that children are capable of constructing their own knowledge. He further states that the main contributors in the guidance of cognitive development are the cultural and social interactions. The children learn according to the stimuli that they are given. For instance, when a parent reads to a child, Vygotsky says that the child tends to gain greater knowledge. In addition, he explains that our social interactions are responsible for guiding our cognitive development. This understanding helped Vygotsky to create ways of defining his theories and offer assistance in children’s development. He called the first theory zone of proximal development or ZPD, in which the children’s activities become quite hard to achieve on their own. However, the involved tasks are learnable through help and guidance from other people. Furthermore, the stage of scaffolding is the second and involves changing the range of support which is offered to children in the process of learning to do something. The trainer tends to help less as the children gain greater ability. Generally, the theory states that no particular period is set for a child to learn or do particular things, as they ought to be developed by the social interactions which the children experience. Moreover, various teaching strategies were introduced to coordinate with this theory in order to help children in learning.
On personal opinion, both of the arguments explained by Piaget and Vygotsky seem applicable at various levels. None of them can be termed as invalid because childhood development involves both biological and humanitarian aspects. This is a question of nurture versus nature, and the social aspect may be equally important in a child’s development as the biological. The two theories may actually function jointly. For instance, the mind is able to handle only what development has enabled. This further means that the child is capable of accomplishing tasks to some extent where the mind and brain have developed. The cultural and social activities can be responsible for accelerating or slowing development of a certain child as well as stimulating the process. Therefore, the biological capabilities as well as socio-cultural power, usually work together in the formation and enhancement of the cognitive development of a child. Good parents always strive...